Or: mixing characters from Valve's good zombie game and Capcom's bad zombie game.

Coach, Nick, Ellis, and Rochelle will soon be controllable in yet another game, but it's not Left 4 Dead 3. Instead, Capcom is borrowing Valve's iconic zombie-slaughtering quartet for the upcoming PC version of Resident Evil 6 and loaning some of its zombies as new downloadable enemies for Left 4 Dead 2.

The Left 4 Dead 2 protagonists will be available in a special "Mercenaries No Mercy" mode in RE6 through a free download available on April 5, two weeks after the game's March 22 PC release. The mode will also make use of the Witch and Mini-Tank special infected zombies from the series, which should prove to be about a million times scarier than any of the undead that were actually featured in the original Resident Evil 6. Speaking of which, sometime this spring, Left 4 Dead 2 players will be able to fight against the Lepotitsa, Napad, and Ogroman zombies from Resident Evil 6, rebuilt by Valve's designers using public Steam Workshop tools.

On one level, this is an obvious cross-marketing opportunity, joining together two of the best-known zombie-killing franchises in video gaming (and bringing to mind Left 4 Dead's previous crossover with Payday: The Heist). On the other hand, while both Left 4 Dead games have been nearly universally praised by critics and fans, Resident Evil 6 was seen as a major critical failure for the storied franchise, with reviews generally ranging from bad to mediocre.

And what about Left 4 Dead 3? We know some people were mad when the second game in the series was announced so soon after the first, but it's now approaching 4 years since the last time Valve offered up a chance to take on the zombie hordes (DLC updates and patches notwithstanding). The closest we've gotten to an official confirmation of a new L4D is Valve's Chet Falsizek telling Eurogamer in October that the game would be coming "some time down the road." What would that sequel look like? According to a Falsizek interview with NowGamer, it would "[need] to be more than a new city with four characters." And... that's about all we've heard from Valve so far.

In the meantime, at least we get to control the familiar survivors in another series. For his part, Faliszek said in a statement, "We're huge Resident Evil fans, so when the opportunity arose to work directly with Capcom to combine L4D2 and RE6, we jumped at it." Yeah right... I bet they're just jumping at a chance to procrastinate more on the next Left 4 Dead, right commenters?[/sarcasm].

Me and Keith got lost in some city named Possum, or Raccoon, or sumthin' like that. Anyways, Keith saw some crazy monsters stumblin' around and thought it would be a good idea to, y'know, rustle 'em up a bit... I tell you what, he did NOT see that pack of rabid Dobermans comin' around the corner. And I was all shoutin', like, "Keith! Get out of there, man!" and he was all, like, "Oh damn ohdamnohdamnohdamn," runnin' like a chicken with its head cut off.

A ways back, Gabe made some comments about what developments he'd like to see for the Left 4 Dead series. The biggest item on his wishlist was a major increase in CPU and memory budget for the AI director- clever level design and well written characters can only retread the same gameplay so many times before wearing thin. Like a physics engine that genuinely impacts on gameplay, that has to be something that stays consistent on every system the game is ported to, and that wasn't ever going to happen on the current crop of consoles.

Now that the new console generation is upon us, maybe they'll gobble up Mike Booth and Turtle Rock for a second time and get him to come up with something really exciting.

fight against the Lepotitsa, Napad, and Ogroman zombies from Resident Evil 6

LOL... did they have a Serbian developer on a team?!?

Because those words would be "Beauty", "Attack" and "Huge" zombies in English.

According to the lore, you're 100% correct with the names of those zombies, and that's because they were first seen in a Serbian country in-universe, where the local government forces named them pretty quick. An upvote to you.

I'm not based in Oz (so have no need to do this) and therefore cannot vouch for it's accuracy.

Indeed, I am aware of this, but I haven't tried because of this:

Quote:

You cannot play online with your friends (even if they have patched it).

Also, I couldn't be bothered stuffing around with that stuff, and then probably having to do it again every time the game is patched and so on. I'd not in a particular hurry to play a L4D2 again, so I figure I'll just wait until the official R18+ version comes out. (Valve said sometime in January that they definitely want to do this. I'm not sure what's taking them so long though.)

Incidentally, the fact that it's possible to patch L4D2 to restore the full gore which caused it to be refused classification makes me think about the "hot coffee" thing with GTA.

As I understand it, one of the GTA games (I've forgotten which) had to be reclassified or something after it was discovered that the game could be patched to enable a scene where the player's character hooked up with a hooker. There was no porn or anything, and this scene wasn't possible without hacking the game anyway, but for some reason the game had to be reclassified anyway. (Ridiculous, right? Any game can be hacked to do pretty much anything - so it's silly to reclassify because of this.)

Anyway, if GTA had that problem, then why doesn't L4D2 have that problem? It seems the same to me; ie. it's possible to hack the game to enable content which would push it past it's current classification. Perhaps everyone now understands that the GTA thing was a mistake.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.